Multicultural television in Norway

This entire summer, NRK2, one of the state TV channels in Norway, have been broadcasting Bollywood movies every Friday night. To me, this was a real treat. Although I don’t enjoy every singly Bollywood movie (how could I, when they produce over 900 per year?), I seem to me more receptive to them than many others. In Jakarta, I found a theatre owned by an Indian family, that often showed the latest Indian movie, and that provided perfect escape from reality – I also saw some really great movies, like Dhoom:2, Lage Raho Munna Bhai and Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna. I have been enjoying watching the movies this summer with my mother (it is fun to share such a moment with her). Movies I really enjoyed were Dhoom, Munna Bhai M.B.B.S. and Mohabbatein.

Tonight I saw that they were showing Fanaa – a movie I saw during my first month in Jakarta and really loved. It’s a crazy movie, almost like two movies turned into one – after about 1,5 hours it completely changes from docile love-story to high-octane terrorist thriller… and back. Only Bollywood, I tell you, only Bollywood.

Of course, for me it is extra fun because I have some small ambitions of eventually learning Hindi. So I enjoy trying to pick up words and phrases when they speak (this probably annoys my mother quite a bit). I am incredibly happy though, that Norway has a state television that dares to show foreign films from around the world (with no advertising of course). Yesterday we watched a German film on NRK1 (Agnes und seine Bruder) which was also quite good. And most days, there is a French movie, a Spanish movie, a Danish… NRK2 even had a Brazilian soap this summer (City of Men) which was great – since I am kind of planning to learn Portuguese as well.

Norway might be a lot less multi-cultural than Toronto, and we have problems with integration and xenophobia. But I love things like this. And of course I am still waiting for them to recognize the world’s biggest film industry: Nollywood!

Stian

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 1st, 2007 at 12:53 pm and is filed under India, media, movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.